Main content

Stephen Fry: Seven things we learned when he spoke to Rylan about How to Be in Love

Rylan is looking for love and he’s asking the experts for help. On his podcast, How To Be In Love, Rylan speaks to a range of guests to find out what they’ve learned about love and what wisdom they have to teach him.

His first guest is the writer, actor and presenter Stephen Fry, who has had a complex relationship with love throughout his life. He tells Rylan about love at first sight, the thing you should always seek in a partner, and why he swore off sex for 15 years.

Here are seven things we learned from their conversation…

1. Stephen first fell in love at boarding school

Stephen Fry says that as a child he was “bored silly [of love]. I saw it as this strange interloper in movies. I was having a really good time and then the adventure stops… and they’re kissing.” His parents had such a happy marriage that he assumed love meant always being content. When he first felt the stirrings of infatuation, he was confused.

Rylan and Stephen Fry in the studio
I thought I was doing the right thing and that it would make me happy, but it became clear one day that it didn’t
Stephen on his celibacy

He was 13 or 14 when he was first romantically attracted to a boy. “My heart leapt into my throat and I didn’t know what was going on,” he says. “I was obsessed. I just stared at him… It took an age to diagnose it, to see what it was. It seemed like an illness.” He eventually confessed his feelings, which thankfully were reciprocated.

2. He was celibate for 15 years

In 1981, Stephen moved to London to become an actor. “It was the same year – although we didn’t know – that a virus arrived in London too: HIV.” He found the threat of HIV and AIDS overwhelming, which profoundly affected his view of relationships. “I started going to funerals of friends from university. It was just heart breaking. That, plus work, meant that I just didn’t have a partner or sex for 15 years.”

He began to consider love and sex simply not worth it. “All I could see was the negative side,” he says. “I thought I was doing the right thing and that it would make me happy, but it became clear one day that it didn’t… I suddenly felt that my life was a complete failure and that everything in it was wrong. I was feeling lost and disconnected.”

3. When celibacy ended, he found love

During his period of celibacy, Stephen began what he calls “an adventure of discovering what it was that was wrong with me, which was that I have bipolar disorder,” a condition that causes extreme changes in mood, from deep depression to elation.

He sought treatment and eventually, once he felt better, found himself in a shop around the corner from his home in London. He knew the shop owner well. “I always thought her son [Daniel] was rather charming and I knew he was gay,” he says. “I found myself doing something I never thought in the world I would do.” He went into the shop and asked Daniel to dinner. “He said, ‘Yes, that would be really lovely’. I walked out thinking, ‘I said that! I said that to another human being!’” They were together for 14 years.

4. His husband introduced him to Kendrick Lamar… And WWE Wrestling

Stephen is now married, to comedian Elliott Spencer, who is 30 years his junior. Stephen says one of the things he loves about having a younger husband is that “[younger people] are more experienced in the world as it is now… So much of what I love in music and literature and so on is not necessarily from this century. He teaches me things I just didn’t know. He introduced me to Kendrick Lamar, which was a great thing to do because Kendrick Lamar, I’ve decided, is a great poetical spirit.”

Stephen Fry in the How to Be in Love studio

And there’s a far more surprising interest he’s picked up from his husband. “He has a great affection for – and I guess you could call it ironic, but it’s real – WWE [World Wrestling Entertainment]… And I just don’t know if I can reveal this extraordinary truth, but I’ve bought a couple of tickets to Wrestlemania in Las Vegas.”

5. Being famous is a picnic… But, occasionally there will be wasps

Rylan tells Stephen he worries about dating as a well-known person, because he doesn’t know if his dates will be interested in him or his fame. Stephen says his own husband has no interest in celebrity events. But he warns that dating as a celebrity will always come with some baggage that any partner will have to contend with.

“Being famous is a picnic,” he says, “but occasionally on a picnic there will be wasps. Wasps are the press and the trolls, who will drive you indoors because you can’t take them anymore.”

6. He values cheerfulness above all else

“One of the most important human virtues, I think, isn’t even really considered a virtue, but it is one that changes the world,” says Stephen. “It’s not kindness, which is obviously important, but it’s a subset of kindness, perhaps. And it’s cheerfulness… When you’re in the presence of a cheerful person, it makes everything better. They’re like their own sunshine. So that’s one of the things [you need in a relationship]. If one of you is down, [they have] to help the other.”

7. He thinks love should be horizontal, not vertical

Asked how the love he feels now compares to the love he felt as a romantic teenager, Stephen says, “It’s calmer. It’s horizontal, not vertical… It changes and moves [through time] in a calm, sort of straightish line. If it was a graph, it would just be a little up and down, but a straight line moving through time. Whereas when I was a teenager, everything was a tempest of feeling. ‘Oh god he didn’t look at me! He’s gone off me!’… Everything is desperate and urgent.” He likes the horizontal version. “It’s worth whatever you can do to find it and give it as well as [receive it].”

More from Rylan